Chapter 10 of Grazian's book is devoted entirely to the digital age (the internet). He presents the good and the bad that's come from the advent of online life. The good is obvious to see. We now have entertainment and knowledge at our fingertips, making our fun and our learning more efficient. It's harder to see what can go wrong, but certainly the internet can dumb us down quite a bit if we're not careful. With so much information out there, it's hard to concentrate on any one thing for very long.
Interestingly, Grazian makes use of many extreme cases to illustrate the harm of the web. These examples include the college class president at Lehigh that gambled away 7500 dollars to online poker then robbed a bank as well as the girl on Myspace who committed suicide because of bullying. Are these just isolated events or are they something we're all sort of subjected to? I think the extreme cases are isolated events having to deal more with the sanity of the people involved than the internet itself. The internet is truly harmful in sneakier ways. Having so much information rush over us at once results in conflicting and often untrue information that can be harmful in the long term.
So, for discussion... Do you think the internet gets blamed for things that are really our own personal faults? For instance, with the gambling college student. Was he a victim of the internet or did he just abuse his self control? Do we need to keep a closer eye on the web or should we trust it?
-Roman
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In the case of the gambling college student, he brought that upon himself. As everyone knows we have a casino close by so I could just as easily go blow my money there. The internet is a great thing and is a way of life now. People just need to learn how not to abuse things. With or without the internet, people still abuse things and if they are not making mistakes on the internet they will do it somwhere else.
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